Thoughts and Ramblings of a Disabled Vet

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While I don’t write much on this old site of mine anymore (even though I keep saying I will) I actually spend a fair amount of time in the engine room. Updating this, cleaning out that, oiling that other thing, etc and so-on. So while wandering in the more dank and dusty corners I found this thing I didn’t recognize at first.

It was the editor thingy that I used to write posts with so long ago. It was somewhat of surprise to me since I seem to have forgotten it even existed. Probably means I need to clean out the the darker corners of the engine room more often?

So I dusted it off until I could see all the buttons and writing area and such, powered it up (whereupon it did not explode) and ran some basic diagnostics. After a couple of whacks with a hammer the diagnostics ran clean so…

…I decided to run a test post before I took a shower just to see if it still worked. The test post not the shower.

So if you’re all seeing this post on the old site then the engine room must still be in working order. Now, does this mean that I’ll continue to write up new blathering on a regular basis? No, it does not.

It’s Friday the 13th, one of my favorite days and just another way to kick a superstition in the butt. The origin of which is as vague as the superstition itself. One includes the combination of the number of people that attended the last supper (13) plus the day Jesus was crucified (Friday–the next day after the last supper). Another is Friday, October 13th, 1307 when France’s King Philip IV ordered the abrupt arrest of all the Knights Templar. There’s more of course but lets not drag things on shall we?

It doesn’t really matter these days what with the latest generation of adults showing an amazing ignorance of the past. Even in music. Kid sits on the curb avidly listening to Led Zepplin’s “Stairway to Heaven” and then asks me if they were a new band. Never mind knowing where an ancient superstition hails from. But I digress.

So what’s my plans for the day? I think I’ll kick 4 butts at once. I’m going to haul out our extension ladder, find a black cat and a mirror. The cat can walk across my path while I’m walking under the ladder smashing the mirror. All on Friday the 13th.

More and more over the last few years I’ve been seeing that term in all sorts of places. Online magazines, articles, news and such, and it’s all about being connected, always connected. And now you can even order a “smart home” built from the ground up, one of prefab jobs I guess. Start out fresh with a clean slate and nothing but dirt and a foundation (a smart foundation by any chance?) and go up from there in a very connected way. And when the builders/electricians/plumbers/technicians are finished?

Smart refrigerators, smart thermostats, smart electrical sockets, smart light switches, smart light bulbs (that function as wireless thingies as well), smart stoves, ovens and microwaves. Smart everything including the toilets and you can monitor and control everything from your smart phone. Oh yeah, the house itself is smart as well with (smart) security cameras everywhere, smart windows and walls plus a (also smart) security system (with smart locks no doubt) that will notify the local authorities if you decide to use the bathroom in an unsafe manner. And all this has brought me to this conclusion:

I have a dumb home.

A very dumb home for that matter. I mean, we don’t even have a thermostat let alone a ‘smart’ one seeing as how we heat with wood and all. All of our appliances are as non-smart as they come with the possible exception of our new-ish home entertainment center which includes a smart TV and we don’t even let that connect to anything from the outside either. Sort of forced non-smartness. So it just kind of sulks in the corner and plays DVD movies at us upon our request. Even our vehicles are dumb. No touch screens in the dash, no rear-view cameras, no GPS navigation or satellite radio–nothing like that. Just plain old knob and button type vehicles that I’ve driven all my life–more or less. Yup, our home is definitely dumb which has led me to yet another conclusion:

I like dumb.

I’m not sure I could acclimate to living in home that’s smarter than me. I spent many long years working and playing in the world of computers and electronics and I’ll admit that I’ve not lost my love of gadgets. However, a home that depends entirely on smart-gadgets to operate is all fine and dandy until the power goes out. Then what? Sounds like the smart home would suddenly revert to downright stupid.

When the power goes out at my dumb old home, especially during the winter, at least I know I’ll still be warm and cozy and the gas stove will still work. Meanwhile these smart home owners will be hoping their backup generators will start so they can reboot their homes.

For those who have known me through this old blog of mine over the years, the ones who are left probably recall that I once really knew what I was doing back in the days. That, however, has changed and it became obvious to me just this last couple of days. I have to learn that SEO stuff all over again.

I’ve always been a happy blogger or at least a content one as long as the platform I used behaved itself–which occasionally it didn’t. Things were rather more difficult in the early years since the platform I used and still use was terribly primitive as compared to today’s version. Still, it was always a good feeling when you managed to ‘hard code’ a widget into that pesky sidebar you’d been working on the past week. Nowadays it’s all point and click and I couldn’t ‘hard code’ if my battered old soul depended on it.

I used to post once every day or so, I had plenty of visitors and several contacts of the ‘Blogging Pro’ variety. I even earned those badges on that pesky sidebar I mentioned earlier. I was known to help other folks who were just starting out their own adventure in blogging using the same platform I was. I didn’t even charge them–glad to help since there were those who helped me early on.

And any post I published could easily be found on the first page of any major search engine. I really knew that SEO stuff back then

But that was then. It certainly isn’t now.

So what happened? I slowly stopped writing up posts is what happened. No real reason for it at all, I just seemed to fall into some sort of semi-retired somnolence as my (writing) imagination slowly fizzled out. No matter what I did I couldn’t come up with a single worthwhile thing to post about.

Fast forward to today (about 2 years of very sporadic posts later), I decided to see if I could get back into it a bit. I’d always kept my blogging platform updated with the latest virtual doo-dads and upgrades so no problem there and the site worked slick enough but that was about it. It was when I went looking for the old ‘Google Webmaster Tools’ that it finally hit me that I’d been gone too long.

Google webmaster tools was gone. Where did it go?

After much anguished searching I finally found out that ol’ GWT had been totally revamped and was now called ‘Google Search Console‘. So I guess I’m no longer a web master but a…uh…search? A console? A search console? Whatever.

I also found out that although my site was still listed in the ‘Search Console’ that was about it. During the transition from’webmaster’ to ‘search console’ Google had managed to not only strip out my sitemaps listings but removed my site verification as well. The verification I so carefully and manually ‘hard coded’ long ago.

Thankfully, the ‘hard coded’ verification code I had placed in my site’s engineering section back in the stone age was still there and I was able to verify it once again. Then it was resubmitting the XML sitemaps but wait–there no sitemaps to submit. The damn things were apparently missing and I had to go find them again. Then I found out the reason they were missing and had to re-install a plugin that I removed a couple of days ago, along with said sitemaps. Then I had to regenerate and re-submit and verify some more and take care of crawl errors which were thankfully few and…

By this time my brain was so overheated my eyeballs were bubbling. It wasn’t used to being used for so much for so long since it’s been so long since it’s been used for anything much. Probably need to give it a rest and let it cool down some before I attempt anything else.

Confusing paragraph, yes?

So I guess I’m in for a re-learning curve if I’m to continue on. A lot of things have changed as far as blogging is concerned. Different rules, different online environment, different everything. Lots to learn.

Well, what the heck. I’ve got all winter and perhaps it will wake my brain back up?

The title says it all really. I started out booting into the Windows 10 side of my machine in order to update Microsoft’s latest (my main OS is Linux Mint just so you know) and just started farting around with all sorts of things afterward–always a mistake on my part.

I ended up playing around with MS’s new-ish Edge browser with it’s new-ish extensions feature, loaded it up with my usual password manager and ad blocker then I went on a viewing binge just to see how this new-ish browser worked on my usual sites including the back end of my old blog here. That’s where the trouble began.

I had to update whatever plugins needed updating as I had gotten a bit behind of late but then, much against my usual better judgment, I got into screwing around with a couple of other themes losing the “Note to my readers” widget along the way. How I did that I have no idea. If you move a widget from the sidebar to the “Available widgets” column it’s not supposed to just disappear is it?

Whatever.

So I switched to Firefox, changed everything back sans the missing widget and wrote this short little post for no apparent reason. Oh yeah, I also had an SEO plugin that kept complaining about how lousy my posts were written with respects to search engine optimization plus it also kept telling me that I had to write this that way and move that this way and where’s the damn key word anyway?